Here we try to answer some of the common questions we get asked or see asked in various fora. There are now a number of Structured Literacy Facebook Groups where teachers help each other with questions like these. We recommend you find one and join. A list of the ones we know about can be found here.

Where are children reading in the levelled system once they've completed decodables to stage 7 (of Little Learners Love Literacy), i.e once they have been introduced to all 44 phonemes?

At the end of Stage 6 (Year 1) most children can read Green L12/13 on levelled texts and at the end of Stage 7.5 (Year 2) this is approximately Purple L19/20.

At what level do people transition from decodable readers on to PMs/Ready to Reads generally?

Many find Stage 7 LLLL a good time to introduce a wider variety of texts. Once a solid knowledge and application of decoding strategies are in place. But it does depend on the student of course. Some are ready from stage five as they have embedded wonderful understandings and seem to be ‘natural’ readers. Others with specific needs stay till the end of stage 7 - embedding encoding skills as much as decoding. You get a feel the more you work with the process.

Another teacher commented that she has been introducing PMs around stage 6 of LLLL .. generally level 10 PMs and the kids cope really well. Her plan was stage 7 half and half. This should be around end of green/orange. Those that are having more difficulty with reading would stay with more decodables.

What do we do with all the levelled texts/instructional readers that have been been replaced by decodable texts, as part of our structured literacy programme?

We do not recommend sending home levelled texts for reading practice until students have mastered the entire Code. And by that stage they might well want to read other types of books - exposing them to far more rich and complex texts that do not resemble the old early readers would be more beneficial in our view. You could use the texts as read-alouds for vocabulary enrichment (or gift them to parents to do the same at home), but if you want to engage with comprehension and rich vocabulary, we would recommend exposing the kids to texts that are beyond their reading ability but within their comprehension/vocab ability - again, these are not going to be your old readers, they're going to be the read-alouds that are made with these sorts of skills directly in mind. You could get creative and cut up the pictures in the books for children to use as prompts to create their own oral stories. This article by Phonics Books goes into the issue with using levelled texts in more detail. It’s important to note that a Structured Literacy approach still encourages adults to read to children a wide variety of rich and complex texts and to model a love of reading. It’s just that as the children are mastering the ‘code’ the texts they are given to practice their reading skills are controlled.

Our school is just starting out with Liz Kane's The Code and I have been looking at the Heggerty Phonemic awareness to go with this. I have been asked how it is different and how it would complement the code.

The Code teaches the alphabetic code (phonics), so linking phonemes (sounds) to graphemes (letters). Heggerty is a phonemic awareness programme; no graphemes are involved. Phonics and phonemic awareness are different but are both necessary skills in order to learn to read. One example of how they compliment each other would be: Heggerty teaches children to aurally blend and segment sounds in words. The Code teaches how to blend and segment letters to read and spell words. If you can't first do this aurally you will struggle to do it when faced with printed words.

How do you implement SL in the senior classroom where some students need to start right from y1/2 level? Do I teach whole class or split into groups?

If no other supports are available we recommend you split your explicit teaching times. Whole class minus those requiring that foundation level ( they could work on other practice activities at this time). You teach the group requiring foundation skills during instructional reading time as a group taking them from PA - grapheme in isolation - word level - sentence level - text level completely decodable. It won’t be beneficial to any students with such great diversity if you try to cater to all.